The Wrath of Kwan
by Gypsy Love
Summary: Ms. Kwan breaks down after Jimmy and Spinner's little stunt.
1. Chapter 1

The eggs on the car was the absolute last straw. The egg yolks and whites shined on the car under the dim streetlights, glazed like some stupid cake.

Enough was enough. Mrs. Kwan sucked in her breath, put one finger on the mess slathered all over her car. Hunched her shoulders up and started to weep. It felt good, really. She hadn't cried, really cried, in months. Maybe years.

She had been too busy staying strong to cry. Strong for her husband as he went through round after round of chemo and radiation. It didn't seem to be working, but she wouldn't let him see the hopelessness on her face.

Dragging herself to work everyday, finding it harder and harder to deal with seventh and eighth graders. They were childish and immature and did not pay attention. They tried her patience. If they could ever be quiet and listen, really listen to what the authors of the stories and poems and plays were saying they might learn something. Something about life and love and themselves. But they would not listen.

They would not listen, and certain ones tried her patience more than others. Spinner Mason. Jimmy Brooks. Ashley Kerwin. She knew she was out of patience, knew some compassion for her profession and her students had run dry. But there was nothing for it. Dreading the alarm clock's mechanical call, dreading herself in the morning, making toast and coffee like an automaton, her husband hunched and curled in his uncomfortable sleep next to her empty spot in the bed, if he wasn't in the hospital.

Dragging herself to work, a travel mug of lukewarm coffee in her hand. It was just another six and a half hours to get through, to survive. She felt like that dumb poster everyone seemed to have when she was a kid, the one with the kitten barely hanging onto a tree branch, a look of tired fear on the kitten's face. The caption beneath it read, 'hang in there, baby,' She was that damn kitten only she was losing grasp of her tree branch, her claws swiping uselessly at air.

The kids, all day long. Talking, laughing, snapping gum, listening to walkman's or ipods behind their books, making out in the hallways. Did they think she was stupid?

She couldn't get through to them, she couldn't break through, and she no longer had the energy to try. They didn't like her like they liked Mr. Simpson but she didn't care. It wasn't about like. It was about knowledge, it was about what she could impart to them. But all she got was disrespect, half-assed assignments, glazed stares, clock watchers. Her husband sick, her sleep cycle seriously messed up, coffee had no power to fuel her any longer. Degrassi had become a prison, her students her wardens. Constantly stretched beyond her limit. The little reed bends and survives, but anything bent too much will break, too. Or never snap back to its original shape.

She didn't know who egged the car and she didn't care. It might as well have been every last one of her students, her teaching job, her husband's tumors, her broken potential. All the energy and spirit she had in college, when coffee could rev her up to full speed, when she had a million sparkling ideas and the world was hers, when she loved her husband and nothing would harm him, all that had drained away.

She covered her face, dissolved in her tears, the sobs coming from the soles of her feet. It was too hard. Her husband was going to die. She hated her job. She couldn't remember what she had been so happy about in college. She hated her blunted emotions, her robotic days, choking on the chalk dust. Smothered by poorly written papers, the slamming of the lockers like the rattling of forged chains.

She couldn't clean the car. She couldn't go back to work. She couldn't save her husband. She was failing right across the board.

"I give up," she whispered, sinking to her knees, covering her head with her arms, the sobs shaking her like earthquakes, like thunder, like war. She'd cry until she was dry, she'd cry until she was empty.

"I give," she said, punching the side of her car, her fist covered in the drying slime of the raw eggs. The tears kept coming, all her saved up tears.


	2. Chapter 2

Rarely had she thrown up the white flag, the hand raised in supplication. _I give, I give._ Rarely did life try to so aggressively destroy her, and from every side. Work, husband, herself. All were slowly sinking down the tubes. And not so slowly.

She stood, the messy insides of the eggs already cementing themselves to the car. The glistening shiny interior, clear and yellow mixed. She stared at it, saw her reflection in it. A face she no longer recognized.

Her husband lay on the couch inside their townhouse, fighting off the nausea. He had medication for it but it didn't seem to help. Every time he ran from the couch to the small downstairs bathroom and she heard the retching noises from deep in his stomach, she felt herself start to slip. Felt herself feeling what he felt. She was as nauseas as a kid on an ocean liner.

Inside, and she got a bucket of warm water and soap suds, a big sponge. Clean the egg off the car. Make herself some green tea with lemon. Rub her husband's back. Watch some mindless T.V. Sleep. And then call Raditch in the morning and explain to him that she needed some time off or she was going to go stark raving mad. That was the plan.

She slopped the water and soap on the car and scrubbed, and she didn't even feel defeated anymore. She felt nothing. It was almost nice. Nothing could effect her anymore, she'd reached some internal limit.

Inside, the soft warm glow of her favorite lamp lighting the room along with the blue glow of the T.V., she watched sitcom after sitcom after reality show, getting lost in the fictional humorous situations and real humorous situations of others. The tiny others trapped under the glass of her T.V. set, and she let the laugh tracks lull her. Her husband slept, the uncomfortable, desperate sleep of the truly ill and she felt the feelings start to filter back. Pain. Worry. Deep deep concern. It hadn't gone far. Her frozen apathetic state was all too brief.

She'd call Raditch in the morning, see just how much time she could take off. Because she was done. Her compassion for those kids had burned down like a thick wick on a candle, gone. She had nothing more to give them, and they were taking from her. They were parasitic. They were like some tape worm feasting on all her nutrients, leaving her hungry and malnourished.

The clock kept its time as it always did, and the numbers crept up and then down. The shows became stranger and racier, more and more perverted little characters were slipping into the mix. She watched mostly Americans living American Southern California lives and didn't care. These lives had nothing to do with her small school and small Toronto neighborhood. Maybe that was best.

She stood, feeling the soreness that had settled into her back and limbs, and searched for the remote. It was gray and tended to blend into the rug, but she saw its dull gleam and snatched it up. Flipped off the T.V. and her husband moaned in his sleep. She'd leave him here. It wasn't good to wake him up. Alone, she crept up the stairs to the bedroom.

She shed her clothes one by one, tossed them into the corner that made do as a hamper, and slipped into her sky blue silk pajamas. She hugged her mug of green tea to her chest and looked outside. Her car looked shinier and clean where she had scrubbed the eggs off, and dull and grimy everywhere else. She let the curtain fall back, not caring about the car.

Sleep wouldn't come, as it didn't. So many mornings she'd felt like her eyelids were glued together as she tried to talk about themes and motives in the works of Shakespeare.

In the ultramarine of the night she finally slipped into the most shallow layer of sleep, and she lay suspended there, all worries and cares submerged for the moment. She breathed in and in, the air cooled by the open windows, by the turned down thermostat.

The alarms' familiar call pulled her from sleep and she rolled over, the sheets and blankets rumpled and uncomfortable.


End file.
